


In The Pines

by iggysmice



Category: Gravity Falls, The Walking Dead (Telltale Video Game)
Genre: AJ goes to kindergarten and only stabs like one person, Everyone gets the therapy they need, Ford gets to do science, Gen, everyone is happy, good end au, i'm always looking for tips on my real world accuracy and canon compliance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-02
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-01-20 18:27:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21286181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iggysmice/pseuds/iggysmice
Summary: (Formerly titled "The Good End Universe") Interdimensional deities have the power to shunt those they deem important to a safer universe. Someone must be looking after Clementine and her friends, as right when they were at their most dire, escaping the Delta's boat, injured, scared and Clementine bitten, they found themselves fallen into the woods of rural Oregon and taken in by a kind if eccentric scientist and his family. Stanford Pines is ecstatic to study the pathogen that brought the end of these kids' world, and the kids are weary, but willing to try and start new, relatively normal lives here in Gravity Falls.
Relationships: Clementine/Violet (Walking Dead: Done Running), Fiddleford H. McGucket/Ford Pines
Comments: 23
Kudos: 53





	1. The Night Will Be Over Soon

“-And that, Dipper is why we are currently traversing the woods. As to what we may find, it could be another humanoid creature, or it could be a dangerous entity…” Ford’s baritone voice rang through the forest as he led the nervous young teen through the trees. In the background, a steady mid-tone beep of Ford’s watch indicated what they sought out- an interdimensional anomaly.

In the bushes just off the hiking trail, a small boy sat crouched, watching the two. This man looked like the pictures of a doctor or a teacher, the boy noted. Perhaps he could help. He was not wearing military clothes so he could not be a straggler of the Delta, either. Not to mention, nobody so young as the boy with him would be on a Delta mission.

The child had no idea where he and his friend had wound up. She was injured and beginning to fail in health with a burning fever. If anyone could help, it would be this man who looked like a picture of a doctor. The boy steadied his breath, checked the pistol in his hand for its bullets, and emerged in front of the two on the trail. He regarded them with steely dark eyes and gestured his gun at Ford.

“Are you a doctor?” he asked. His babyish, Southern accented voice was a direct contrast to his intimidating body language.

Ford, having frozen and put his hands up in a show of defense and submission to the armed child slowly lowered them.

“Yes. Are you hurt?” he asked, then glancing slowly around as to not startle the boy, “Where are your parents?”

“I’m not hurt. My friend is hurt, and you’re gonna come help us.” The child said this as a statement, rather than asking. He did not offer a comment on the whereabouts of his parents, or whether he had any.

“Okay. Can you take me to where your friend is?” Ford asked. “What’s your name?”

“I’m AJ. My friend is Clem. Her leg’s cut.” The child spoke in short sentences as he began to lead Ford and Dipper off the trail through the brush. “She’s bleeding and she’s sick.”

“Do you know how long ago she was cut?” Ford asked, wading through the bushes. Dipper followed wearily behind him, choosing to stay quiet at this strange turn of events.

“Just a few minutes ago. Then there was a big light, like a willow-wisp, but it came towards us, and we’re in the woods now.” AJ explained. “We should be more quiet. The herd might hear us.”

“The herd?” Ford began to ask, but then AJ pulled away some pine branches he had set in place evidently to hide his friend and Ford forgot all about the mystery of ‘the herd.’

What he saw was a teenage girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, laying in the brush, barely conscious, flushed with fever and breathing raggedly and laboriously. He immediately saw the ‘cut’ AJ was talking about- the girl’s left leg ended in a bloody, uneven stump at about mid-calf. Clearly, from the bloodied, child-sized jacket wrapped around the wound, AJ had been trying fruitlessly to stop the bleeding himself before seeking help. Ford hadn’t noticed before, but now he saw the boy’s ragged T-shirt (an advertisement for the children’s cartoon “Disco Broccoli” which had been popular, according to Dipper, in the early 2000 years) was bloodied and the red stickiness stained his small hands too.

“Fix her.” AJ demanded, not putting his gun away. The girl, hearing AJ’s voice, blearily opened her amber eyes and spotted Ford.

“Doctor?” she grunted out, shifting to take as much of a defensive stance as she could in her current state.

“Yes, I’m a doctor. I’m going to help you.” Ford calmly told her. Dipper looked panicked and a bit sick. Ford turned to him and firmly told him, “Go back to the manor, prep one of the sick beds. I’m going to get her stabilized and bring her to the medical lab.”

“R-Right.” Dipper agreed and started to scurry off before asking, “Should I take the kid? Maybe I can clean him up?”

“I’m not leaving her.” AJ very firmly responded. Dipper only nodded and continued to backtrack through the woods towards home.

Ford continued to calmly tie a tourniquet around the bloody leg and used a field thermometer to check the girl’s temperature- 101.5 and rising even as he looked. He looked to AJ, as the child, despite being a child, seemed to be more coherent then his friend.

“Could she have caught anything? Malaria, or MRSA or anything like that? Do you know?” he asked the child.

“I don’t know what none of those are, so I guess no.” AJ reported.

“Her fever is very high…” Ford picked the girl up- she was very slight but all tensed muscle- and began a fast stride back towards the trail. AJ looked scared, and then guilty for a moment before grunting in response and following Ford, his little legs doing a surprisingly good job keeping up.

It was but five minutes before Ford had Clem through a cellar door of the large mansion building and, in a bed, fixing her wound with stitches and bandages. He attempted to get information from AJ once more, as the girl had become unresponsive save for the occasional groan in protest when he moved or prodded her injury.

“What happened to her leg?” he asked the little boy, who was sitting on a chair nearby watching with the same steely expression he had worn when threatening Ford and Dipper in the woods.

“It was cut.” He said shortly, as he had every time since meeting that Ford had asked.

“Yes, I am well aware, but what cut it, and why?” Ford probed. AJ once more looked guilty for a moment before resuming his stoic expression, very unfitting on such a young face.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Was there an infection?”

“You ask too many questions, _sir_.”

Ford blinked in surprise at the venom in the boy’s voice and decided to leave it alone for the time being. Clem’s blood pressure began to drop and her breathing grew shallow. Her temperature was 103 and still climbing. Ford, flipping through his medical textbooks decided one last ditch treatment to save her life: Antibiotics. All of them. If he could not determine what infection she had, he would treat for all of them. Loading up the hypodermic needle, he steadied her arm and told her, calmly,

“This will sting a bit, but you should feel much better soon.”

To Ford and AJ’s visible surprise, Clem’s vital signs began to stabilize. Her fever, though present, stopped rising and her breathing slowly rose back to a deep, even rate. AJ, dark eyes wide in absolute wonder, exclaimed,

“I didn’t know medicine could work on a walker’s bite!”

Ford’s blood ran cold at the term the boy uttered. Dipper, unaware of the danger, asked out loud,

“What’s a walker? Grunkle Ford?”

Ford pulled a chair over himself to sit in and massaged his temples agitatedly.

“A walker, Dipper, is a humanoid afflicted with a pathogen which hijacks the nervous system upon brain death.”

“A zombie?” Dipper confirmed, then looked over at Clem and AJ with a deeply troubled expression as Ford nodded. “Oh man…”

“The ‘Walker Pathogen’ is a plague on the multiverse. It roams from dimension to dimension, ravaging all humanoid life. Not even the highest-intelligence beings in the multiverse can find a cure or prevention method for it. Some interdimensional hubs will even kill carriers on sight rather than risk it.” Ford elaborated. AJ politely waited for him to finish and then asked his own questions:

“What’s that mean? Where are we?”

“It means, uh, AJ, right?” Ford forced a smile as the boy nodded to confirm, “It means that you must be refugees from a different dimension. Your world is not the same as ours. You’re safe here, as there are no walkers yet, and hopefully there won’t ever be. The ‘willow-wisp’ you saw was a rift- er, a hole in space and time that brought you and Clem here.”

AJ nodded thoughtfully and then looked at Clem again before speaking.

“What about the other kids?”

“Are there more of you?” Ford asked.

“There’s a bunch more of us. We all scattered a bit when the herd came. I’m the littlest, they’re all mostly around Clem’s age. We think she’s almost sixteen, and I’m about six.” He explained. “Some of ‘em are hurt, too. We were in a fight.”

Before Ford could ask about this further, his anomaly indicator began its steady beeping again and he looked at Dipper.

“We have to find these kids before anyone else does, Dipper. They are carrying the Walker Pathogen and need to be quarantined before they bring it to our dimension. I’ll ask Stanley to drive around the hiking trail entrances. Come on, we have to hurry.”

* * *

Of all the unfortunate things to befall Violet, this had to be in the top five. She could not see, she was damp and cold, and the burns on her face that were the cause of her blindness stung in the air. She slowly staggered forward, listening intently for any other movement around her. When she heard anything, she stopped and listened harder, her nose all but pricked to sense even a little bit of the moldy, rotten smell of a walker. She definitely, after all that had happened, did not want to walk directly into one of the monsters.

Maybe, she thought, the smell of the river would be enough to disguise her. Probably not, as walkers didn’t really seem to be fooled easily unless it was their own scent. Maybe she’d trip over a dead one and be able to camouflage herself, as much as she detested the smell. It would be the safest way to blindly stumble through the forest. She considered that for all intents and purposes, she was a walker, but not really, as she was alive. Barely.

She tripped and ended up on her hands and knees on a smooth, hard ground of packed gravel- an old hiking path. This was a much easier way to travel then through the woods, so Violet began slowly shuffling her way along what she thought must be North, though she really had no idea how to tell. Quick steps caught her hearing and she stopped, and called out cautiously,

“Hello?”

Fully expecting the unearthly growls of a walker in response, she was ready to turn and blindly run when a man’s voice answered.

“Hello, there! Are you lost?”

She did not recognize the voice, but it was a human, so she was grateful, nonetheless.

“Yeah, I’m lost. I can’t see.” She explained, indicating her burned face. Maybe the vision would come back once it healed? She didn’t know. None of them knew. They were kids, some with basic first aid knowledge, but nothing like this. People with injuries like this usually died or were thrown out of groups because of their disabilities. Not that the others would throw her out, but she worried about being unable to hunt or sense danger ever again.

A rough, wide hand very gently landed on her shoulder. She must have tensed up, as the man, just as gently and kindly as his touch was, was fast to reassure her:

“It’s alright, I won’t hurt you. I’m a doctor, I want to help. What’s your name?”

“V-Violet.” She managed, surprisingly weary. There was something very unnerving about being unable to see the stranger currently touching and speaking to you.

“Well, Violet, I’d like to take you back to my medical lab, so I can look at those burns.”

“I… I can’t find the others. Omar is hurt too, and Louis…”

“We’ll find them. Do you know two other kids, Clem and AJ?” the man continued to have a steady, gentle tone, clearly aware of how frightened the teenager was to be alone and blinded and unable to assess the strange man in front of her.

“They’re okay?”

“Clem has a wound to her leg, but otherwise they are fine.”

Violet pushed down her nerves and decided she had to go with this man, since he was the only person who could lead her anywhere useful, and he knew and had Clem and AJ.

“Alright. Take me there.”

* * *

Ford gently sat Violet down in the lab, checking her vision. She had the ability to view light and dark in one eye and absolute non-function in the other. In fact, the worse eye, her left, was already clouding over, indicating that it was, in fact, dead. AJ, leaving his spot by Clem for a moment to wonder what Ford was up to, recognized his friend.

“Vi! It’s AJ, I’m here, and so’s Clem, but she’s asleep!” he announced. Violet immediately seemed less nervous upon hearing the familiar voice.

“AJ? I’m glad you’re both here and safe.”

“Clem was bit, but Dr. Pines saved her!” AJ relayed.

“Clem was bit!?” Violet attempted to get off the bed and was gently held in place by Ford.

“Stay where you are, Violet, she’s going to be fine. Her fever is almost completely gone and the bleeding in her leg has stopped.” He reassured her.

“She’s kind of my girlfriend.” Violet admitted, bracing for the responses she knew adults tended to have about those things. _You’re too young, it’s not what God wants, you’ll find the right man someday…_

“Ah, I see.” Ford did not seem bothered. “Well, I’m sure she’ll be pleased to see you when she wakes up, but for now, you have to stay here and let me finish dressing your eyes. If the burns cause any more corneal damage, you may be permanently blind in that right eye.”

“What about the other one?”

“Well…” Ford paused in his preparation of the wound dressings. “That eye is already clouded- the optical nerve is dead. If it begins to be pushed out or rot, it will have to be removed. I unfortunately cannot save it.”

“Oh fuck.” Violet responded, her tone somewhere between miffed and despondent.

“But Vi, there’s no walkers here!” AJ tried to coax some excitement from his friend.

“I know, AJ, they have like, lights and stuff, I can hear it. I’m sure they’ve got a wall.”

“No! Like… Like there’s no such thing! I don’t understand exactly why, but there isn’t!”

Violet frowned in brief confusion and then decided to ignore the small child’s rambling for a moment in favor of gaining more information about her new surroundings.

“What about the others? You said we’d look for them.” She asked Ford.

“I’ve already asked my brother to go looking for any groups of teenagers, don’t worry.” Ford assured her. “You sit here and let these soothe those burns. I’ll get my partner to send something to eat and drink for you and AJ.”

Violet, resigned to her fate, whatever it was going to be, sat back and let the cool bandages, dipped in some sort of soothing salve be wrapped on her stinging face and lay back on the bed. This, she thought, may as well happen.

* * *

“Looking for kids at eleven at night like a fuckin’ idiot…” Stan grumbled under his breath as he slowly cruised along the hiking trails’ entrances with his car. “Can’t wait ‘til the morning or call the cops, huh, Ford?”

His grumbling stopped as the headlights of the car did catch a group of teenagers, huddled in a circle. Most of them were teenagers, anyway. One looked to be a bit younger, maybe eleven or twelve or so.

“Hey, you kids need help?” Stan asked, leaving his car with a flashlight to approach the group. The young one turned, and Stan stopped where he was as he saw a big serrated hunting knife in the boy’s hand. The kid kind of looked like a scrawny, shaggy-haired gremlin of a boy, not a real threat, but Stan was taking no chances with an armed twelve-year-old. Stan held up his hand not holding the flashlight and assured the group,

“Hey, hey, I’m not gonna hurt you. Stand down, huh?”

He felt more intimidated then he cared to admit when the rest turned to face him and he noticed they all had some sort of weapon on hand.

“Willy, put it down. He might help us.” One of the teens, a small girl with a round face and wild red hair scolded. She was supporting a taller boy with a bandage haphazardly tied around his left leg right below the knee. He did not seem able to put weight on the leg, and blood had seeped through the bandaging.

Another boy, this one with dreadlocked hair and a long, slightly ragged coat approached the front of the group, looked Stan over, and asked him,

“Have you, perchance, seen a horse and a cart full of supplies?”

Stan stared at the kid. _Perchance_, like he was _Ford. _It was much too late at night for this.

“No, no horses and carts here. You kids know a girl with a burned face?” Stan asked.

“Oh shit, they’ve got Violet!” the redhead exclaimed, all but dropping her injured companion.

“Ow! Fuck, Ruby, my leg!” the boy protested.

“We don’t ‘got’ anyone.” Stan informed them. “My twin brother is a doctor. He can help you with your leg there, and whatever you,” he gestured to the long-coated boy who had a wad of bloodied gauze gripped in one hand, “got with your hand.”

“Can he grow fingers back?” the boy asked cheekily.

“Probably not, but he’s got spares- six fingers on each hand.” Stan snarked back. “Maybe you can borrow one.”

“I like you. I’m Louis,” the boy introduced, sweeping a hand over the rest of the group, “And these are my companions, the fellow abandoned kids of Ericson’s Academy.”

“Ford’s gonna get a kick out of this.” Stan almost chuckled as he guided the kids into the car to bring to the manor.

* * *

Clementine’s hearing was the first thing to wake up. She heard soft, steady beeping and a distant chatter of voices. The beeping tickled something in the back of her mind, something from before the walkers- a heart monitor. She had followed her mother to work at the hospital a few times as a child, and vaguely remembered the sounds even now. She opened her eyes and looked around without moving too much.

The room was well-lit, the heart monitor with its steady peaked lines was wired to her own chest. She could not figure out why she was in a hospital, except that perhaps the entire last eight or so years was a coma dream. The walkers, Lee, Kenny, AJ, all her friends, just a dream. Looking around more, she noticed the bandages on her stump of a leg. If that was real, she decided, then her coma theory was already debunked. She was startled when an older man with glasses and a long trench coat came over to her bedside.

“Ah, you’re awake,” he smiled in a friendly way. “I’m sure you’re confused.”

“Um,” Clementine responded stupidly.

“You’re lucky that AJ there was able to find me, or, I suppose that I was out looking for you.” The man turned briefly and offered her a juice box and a plate with a sandwich on a tray. “Are you hungry?”

“Did AJ eat?” she finally found words again. “I don’t eat until he has.”

“He and the others have all eaten, yes. There’s more than enough food to go around here.” The man, a doctor, he must be, Clementine decided, assured her.

She cautiously took a bite of the sandwich, pacing herself despite her stomach screaming for the food. She was used to the feeling and used to eating slowly lest she upset her overeager digestive tract. Nothing was worse then spending an hour getting food only to eat too fast and vomit it back up ten minutes later.

“Who are you?” she asked, almost afraid of the answer.

“My name is Doctor Stanford Pines. I’m a paranormal expert. You can call me Ford, or as the others prefer, Dr. Pines.”

“Paranormal… like, ghosts and shit?” Clem asked, looking at her half-eaten sandwich.

“Yes. Ghosts, cryptids, interdimensional anomalies, and most recently, a cure for Walker Sepsis.” Ford excitedly smiled at her. “You are the first ever victim of a walker bite to be cured.”

“You can’t cure a walker bite.” Clem snorted around her bite of sandwich. “Even cutting it off only works sometimes.” She looked at her stump. “I guess I’m one of the sometimes.”

“No, no, you see, you were showing all the deadly symptoms, most notably, a high fever and general sepsis signs, but I, in a last ditch effort to save your life, gave you several different kinds of broad-spectrum antibiotics at a high dose, and it was able to kick back the bacteria that the bite had given you and save your life.” Ford insisted. Clem stayed silent and debated on whether or not this man was crazy, and whether that meant she should try to leave immediately.

Ford considered her for a moment, “It would be impossible to get the same kinds and quantities of medication in your world, though, considering it must be ravaged by the pathogen already.” Ford watched her quietly for a moment again before continuing, “I’m sure you must be worried about your friends. I have already treated them and they are in the room next door, I sort of turned it into a “rec room” since you will all be here for a while.”

Clem looked over and saw the others were lounged on some couches and beanbag chairs in another room and talking amongst themselves. Violet, most notably, had bandages over both eyes.

“Violet has lost use of her left eye, but her right one should be workable once the burns have healed. I will have to obtain some specialty equipment, but that shouldn’t be hard.” Ford explained. “Louis’s hand will be fine, and the same is with Omar’s tibia. It’s a nasty X-ray, but it will heal perfectly fine in a few months. He’s lucky he’s young.” Ford considered for a moment, “AJ had an old wound on his side that had been pulled back open by his exertion, but all it needed was some bandages and antibiotic cream. He’s a tough little guy if his story of a shotgun wound is true.”

“It is.” Clem responded. “He almost died. I was terrified.”

“I can imagine. Clementine, can you tell me about your home? Where you were before?”

“It’s…. nightmarish.” Clem said, looking down at her empty plate. “The walkers came when I was eight. My parents have been dead about that long- they went on vacation a week before the outbreak and I never saw them alive again. Everywhere you go there’s just this smell of mold and rot. You can hear the walkers groaning and growling at night, and if you run into one, there’s probably fifteen more within hearing distance. Everyone I run into has known someone who was bitten or ripped apart by them.”

Ford nodded solemnly.

“Well,” he began, “I explained this to the others, but you were still asleep at the time- you and they have fallen into an alternate dimension. I have traveled through dimensions and been to walker-ravaged ones, they are indeed ‘nightmarish.’ However, this is not one. You are all safe here. This is Northwest Manor in Gravity Falls, Oregon. A known weak spot in the multiverse. An interdimensional deity of some sort must be looking out for you children, to shunt you to a place and time where you could get the help you needed.”

“Wait. Are you trying to, with a straight face, tell me that God saved us from our ‘home world’ and now we’re somewhere in Oregon?” Clem looked at Ford incredulously.

“Yes, Clementine. A God of some sort thought you and your friends were important enough to save.”

“You’re fucking crazy.” She grunted, shoving the straw into her juice box.

“Be that as it may, you and some of your friends are injured, and I have the means to treat you properly. You are all also carriers of the Walker Pathogen, and so I cannot let you outside the manor property for two weeks. In fact, I am working to set up a living quarters down here so you don’t spread it to my partner and his family either.” Ford calmly told her. “After you are all healed and the quarantine is up, you may leave if you wish. But I recommend against it considering your ages. If you stay here, we will be able to care for not only your physical bodies, but your presumably damaged mental states as well. You will be safe here, and you will be able to lead normal lives.”

“You’re still fucking crazy.” Clem told him, but something inside her told her he was being genuine, so she decided to humor him, at least until her leg was healed enough to move.


	2. Some Exposition

Ford had explained to his family and the kids that they must stay in quarantine for two weeks, and since he had been exposed to the pathogen as well, he would stay down in the lab with them. This was necessary to monitor their overall health anyway. In the mean time, Ford decided to gather data on the children- what their takes on the world they had grown up in were, and how things were for them before. He started with Violet.

She sat in front of Ford, the damp bandages on her face still soothing her burns and the scrapes and nicks on her hands healing, but present. She had cleaned up a little, as all the kids had, but was still made to wear her dirty old clothing from before, as washing clothing in the house could spread the pathogen. However, her light hair was less stringy and greasy and the part of her face that was uncovered by bandages was clean.

“We’re all from a school for troubled kids.” Vi explained. “I might be a sociopath.”

“You don’t strike me as such.” Ford assured her. “What made the adults at the school tell you that?”

“When… when my grandma killed herself, I… didn’t call 911. Maybe I should have. But I thought that, you know, she wasn’t going anywhere, she was right behind me like always, and I wanted to watch cartoons instead. So, I sat there for five hours and watched TV, and my mom called 911 when she got there to pick me up after work. I was eleven. We got chicken nuggets for dinner because my mom felt bad that I had to see all that, and she might have been tired from working and then having to talk to the police and EMTs. I was sent to Ericson’s right after that, because I told her the thing about Grandma not going anywhere.” The girl looked down at her hands though she could not see them folded in her lap. “So, I might be a sociopath.”

Ford was stunned for a moment, taking in the story. He finally found the words he was looking for, the words to reassure this young girl who even before the outbreak had seen such horror:

“That is a common trauma response, Violet. You aren’t a sociopath. You were a child who had no skills or life experience to respond to the horrible event that happened in front of you. So, your mind defaulted to what you always did, what always made you happy and soothed. Your parents should have sent you to therapy, not a school for troubled children.”

“I guess that’s what happens in the South, huh?” Vi responded. Her voice was low and had a crackly quality to it, as if she were trying very hard to keep it steady and not cry. “They’d send me even now because I like girls.”

“Well, nobody is going to send you away here.” Ford reassured her. “I can help you with your trauma and hopefully, over time, you will start to feel better. I’m already brushing up on all my pediatric and adolescent psychology books!”

Ford spoke to each child and found nothing but depressing stories and mounting trauma. Louis had been neglected by his rich parents and acted out to get attention. Ruby had been raised around rough boys and farm animals until her mother gained custody and tried to bring her to the city, where she started getting into fights. Aasim was quiet and ‘too clever for his own good,’ so the foster system had sent him to Ericson’s. Omar stole food from his group home because the little kids were hungry and he could feed them. Willy didn’t remember much about his home before except that there were a lot of police cars, they took away his dad, and then he was at Ericson’s. All of them spoke of their friends who had died over the years.

“Mitch was like my big brother, and those assholes from the Delta killed him.” Willy said, his babyish face dark and angry. “So that’s why I blew up their boat. To avenge him.”

“Sophie and Minnie were my best friends.” Violet kept looking at her hands. “And Louis told me that their little brother Tenn is dead too now. It’s fucked up.”

“I still kind of think AJ is a psycho.” Louis shrugged. “But he’s little. He thought Marlon was going to hurt Clementine. I get it, but I just don’t think someone so little should have a gun, even after everything.”

Finally, Ford came to the two who had not originally been from the school. He decided to speak to Clementine first, to attempt to put her more at ease. Her initial confusion at being in a new place had turned to suspicion and she was now quite obvious about her distrust of Ford and her new surroundings. AJ seemed to side with her on the matter, but also agreed with the other kids that at least they were getting medical care and good food. Louis had informed Ford that the general consensus among the kids was that he was insane, but that he was “pretty okay for an insane guy.”

Ford sat calmly on the chair beside Clementine’s bed. The girl stared harshly at him with her amber eyes and didn’t speak.

“I know you don’t trust me.” Ford broke the silence. “And I understand. I myself have quite a problem with trusting others. I would like to help you, though, and to help, I need to know more about your background.”

“There’s nothing to know. I lost my parents to walkers when the outbreak started, and I’ve roamed ever since until I found the school.” Her tone was firm. Ford was not going to get anything else out of her on that matter.

“What about AJ? How did you come to be his caretaker?”

“I knew his parents. His mom died a while after she gave birth. His dad was already dead by then. He didn’t have anyone else, so I took him.”

“You would have been roughly eleven or twelve when he was born. I carbon-date your current age at about seventeen. Did nobody help you?” Ford raised his eyebrows.

“Some people. They’re all dead now, so it doesn’t matter.”

“You say you are from Atlanta, originally. How did you come to be in West Virginia, where the school is located?”

“I drove.”

Ford shook his head and looked at his notebook. The girl’s steely resolve to not tell him anything was working so far, but he would get there.

He would find out what help Clementine needed.


	3. Rift Walker

It had been roughly two weeks without incident. Clementine grew stronger every day, and had quickly learned to use her crutches, given to her by Ford, to swing around the house. Ford still wanted her mostly in bed at this time and was frequently telling her to slow down or rest. The other kids never seemed to leave the sight of at least one other one of their group, and it was clear that at least some of them concealed weapons on their person. Stan had learned this the hard way when AJ had whipped out a shiv upon being unintentionally snuck up on.  
At night, Ford would occasionally glance over from his work to the bedroom they all inhabited to see them sitting around a battery powered lantern like a campfire and talking amongst themselves through the security system Fiddleford had set up in the house.

Clem’s large bully mix, Rosie followed Ford around. She was huge, muscular and obedient to a variety of commands. The kids had told Ford how she could take down a walker and crush its head in her jaws, and probably do the same to a person. AJ confidently asserted she could crush a tibia just like the gun that shot Omar but wouldn’t specify exactly whose leg he had seen crushed. She was not threatening to Ford, but she wasn’t overly friendly either. She seemed to be simply watching him, ready to act either way dependent on the kids’ cues.

On this particular day, Ford found himself running down the hallway, flanked by Ruby, Louis and Aasim, as Willy’s calls for aid and a whole lot of commotion came from in front of them. They all stopped dead when they saw what the source of the noise was: Willy had a mop in hand and was currently battling back a horrible, rotting facsimile of a human- a walker.

“No way!” Aasim gasped, limply holding the history textbook Ford had been lending him when the commotion had begun. Louis immediately plucked the book from his friend’s hands and threw it full force at the monster. Predictably, the walker was unbothered, and Willy swatted it across the head once more with the mop, hard enough to cause it to stagger for a moment before continuing to lurch towards him.

“Louis! Why the fuck did you think that would work!?” Ruby scolded.

“Nobody else was doing anything!” Louis snapped back, gesturing as Willy swatted the walker again.

“I’m trying to hit the brain, but it won’t go down!” he bleated. Just then, a net shot from a device held by Ford tackled the zombie to the ground and held it there, allowing Willy to drop the mop and pick up Aasim’s book to hand to him. Louis chuckled and lightly punched Willy’s shoulder.

“Can’t handle one walker, even after all this time?”

Ford crouched near the creature as it rabidly thrashed under the net, attempting to get free and letting out unearthly snarls and growls. The most fatal of the injuries the walker possessed was obvious: An absolutely shredded throat, probably inflicted on the victim by another of the kind it now lumbered about as. Even with the horrific injury and the chokingly rotten smell filling the air, Ford was grinning.

“I can’t believe I’ve been lucky enough to a live example of this!” he enthused.

“A walker?” Louis asked. “They’re everywhere.” He was punched hard by Ruby, who reminded him,

“Not anymore!”

“Ow.”

Still, Ford continued to examine the walker as it continued to thrash at him. Unbothered, Ford placed a hand on its forehead to tilt its head up towards him so he could use the opposite hand to shine a light in each eye.

“Fascinating. Eyes have completely clouded; this guy couldn’t see even if his optic nerves weren’t rotten. How does it hunt?”

“By smell.” Ruby had come to crouch next to Ford, to watch him investigate this creature. She wrinkled her nose. “They’re so ugly up close…” Ford shone his flashlight into the remains of the nasal cavity. “Er,” Ruby continued, “Sometimes by sound. They can smell and hear almost like dogs. They just start amblin’ towards any noise they hear or scent of meat they catch.”

“Grunkle Ford, what is _that_ and why does it smell _so bad?_” Dipper approached the group, covering his nose with his shirt to block the stench.

“It’s not that bad! This is only one!” chortled Willy. “Herds smell _way_ worse!”

“Ah, Dipper! You’re just in time! Help me haul him down to the lab, we are going to dissect it!” Ford stood and grinned excitedly at his nephew. Dipper eyed the snarling walker nervously.

“Um.” He hesitated. “How’d it get here?”

“A rift.” Ford stated. The kids looked at each other.

“Like how Rosie got here?” Willy asked. Rosie had arrived a week prior through a rift that had opened directly into the bedroom the kids inhabited, prompting Ford to have to explain transdimensional physics to several teenagers who had minimal understanding of science at three in the morning.

“Yes. I believe there is a weak dimensional barrier between ours, and so any creatures, living or otherwise are able to come through via rifts.” Ford explained. “Dipper and I are going to take this specimen down to the lab and see what makes it tick!” The ‘specimen’ snarled so hard a tooth was expelled onto the carpet. Dipper didn’t look thrilled, in fact he looked somewhat sick. “Come along, Dipper.” Ford hoisted the net over his shoulder, causing the walker to be thrown upside-down and crumple to the bottom of the net, still snarling as he carried it in the direction of the lab. “I can carry it but grab that tooth. Fiddleford will throw a fit if that doesn’t get into the biohazard bin.”

Dipper looked wearily at the other four kids before bending down to pick up the rotten tooth.

“Never become a lab assistant, guys.” He warned before trotting after Ford.

* * *

Down in the lab, Ford had restrained the walker to a table, given himself and Dipper protective equipment in the form of surgical masks, face shields and gowns to protect their clothing and faces from the putrid creature in front of them. Ford was poised over it with a scalpel in his bare hand.

“Ford, uh, don’t you have gloves?” Dipper asked, holding the walker’s head steady with a firm grip as it tried to thrash under his gloved hands.

“I do, but for cutting I prefer to have my full dexterity.”

“You mean you think the guy at the medical supplies store was going to call the FBI for child labor because you were buying so many double-XL gloves and extra small at the same time.” Dipper clarified.

“No, Dipper.” Ford cut into the walker’s body cavity. “The FBI doesn’t handle child labor, that’s the Department _of_ Labor.”

“This smells _really_ bad.” Dipper changed the subject. Ford was slowly extracting one greenish, rotting organ after another, until he got to the stomach.

“Dipper, look here.” He motioned the boy over.

“Ew, is that veins?” Dipper asked of the brownish strings that seemed to be going into the organ itself. Ford shook his head.

“No, it’s not… Let’s move to the brain cavity.”

Upon cutting into the brain cavity, Ford’s confusion increased. He prodded the brain and asked of Dipper,

“Dipper, do you know what usually happens when a human brain is as decomposed as this walker’s other organs display?”

“Uh… not that?”

“It’s usually a fatty soup by now. But this brain is still firm, if off colored. I’m going to attempt to remove a lobe for a closer look.”

Ford had no more then made an incision into the brain when the walker, which had been thrashing and snarling with a wild fervor, went silent and limp. He and Dipper exchanged a glance as Ford resumed cutting and soon produced a whole half of the brain, pale, grayish-pink and devoid of blood normally associated with surgery.

“Here, make a slide with that, and we’ll see what it holds.” He commanded the boy, handing him the hunk of flesh.

“Ugh, it’s warm…” Dipper groaned, carrying it off.

Ford took a deep breath, donned a pair of XXL surgical gloves, and began following the strange brown strands of almost hard material down the spinal cord, until the stomach. He cut open the stomach and found the strands piercing the wall and congregating in a large knot within the stomach itself.

Dipper twisted the knobs on the microscope as Ford came hurrying in, carrying the other hemisphere of the brain as well as the entire spine and stomach. By the time the young teen got up the courage to look up to see what Ford was doing, he had set up the entire affair in a large jar that presumably contained some sort of preservation cocktail.

“Oh. Gross.” He remarked.

“Gross indeed. Let me see the slide.” Ford looked into the microscope and his unobscured eye widened.

“As I thought. It isn’t human tissue, it’s almost plantlike. A parasite, likely fungal in nature.”

“You mean like… _Cordyceps_?” Dipper asked.

“No… it doesn’t match the structure. I have seen _Cordyceps_ mutations in humans before, on other dimensions, so they are possible, but this is not one.” Ford responded, continuing to look at the sample under the microscope. Dipper almost dropped the clipboard he was bringing over for Ford to write this on.

“It’s possible? Humans can get _Cordyceps_?”

“Yes, and it causes a zombie-state similar to a walker, although they’re normally much faster and keep the brainstem alive to maintain organ function… This one must not take over the body until brain death, because you need to die to become a walker.” Ford put his hand on his chin and then winced, before pulling off his glove and resuming his musing. Dipper tapped his fingers together nervously.

“You mean, like, our _Cordyceps_? Like the one in the jungle? It can evolve to infect people? And it makes zombies?”

“Since anybody from an infected dimension can be a carrier for the Walker Pathogen, it must manifest as spores in the bloodstream, which can then latch onto and take over the nervous system upon brain death and therefore a lack of immune system measures…”

“F-Ford you aren’t answering, can our _Cordyceps _mutate to do that?”

Ford paced back past the distraught Dipper, discarding his apron and face coverings as well as both gloves. He approached a whiteboard and began to draw the structure in the jar.

“The high fat content of brain matter must serve as a ‘boost’ to allow the parasite to pilot the body around, looking for more high protein food- hence their attraction to anything meaty.”

“How likely is that to happen? Ford?” Dipper asked, staring fearfully at the jar.

“I need to talk to the refugees to see if a walker’s behavior backs this hypothesis up.” Ford put the marker back on the tray of the whiteboard and rushed back past Dipper to leave the lab and find Clem and her group. Dipper approached the jar and looked at the parasitic structure within.

“Oh man…” he sighed.

* * *

Ford, regrettably realized he had to speak to Clementine and AJ first, since they had the most experience outside of the boarding school in the woods the others came from. So, he sat her and the child down in his office and began,

“I am not here to try and pry anything about you out. This is purely scientific.”

“Okay. What do you want?” Clem responded, adjusting her stump leg in the chair.

“I would like to know about walker behavior and traits. I have not lived among them nearly as long as you and AJ have, and so I would like your input. I am trying to find a cure or prevention measure for this pathogen, so that no other worlds will have to suffer as yours has.” Ford explained. He knew if he were a scared, paranoid teenager sitting there, he would want the person talking to him to be straight and honest, so this was how he approached Clem. “But first, I need to know what exactly the pathogen is, and their behavior profile will help me figure that out.”

“They eat.” Clem began, as she often did with a short sentence. She elaborated, “Their only purpose seems to be to wander around and find meat. If you don’t make your snares high enough, they eat the animals. If you make your fish traps too fragile, they’ll eat the fish. If you get stuck somewhere, they’ll eat you.”

Ford notated that.

“Ruby tells me they hunt primarily by smell and hearing. If you are quiet, and somehow disguise your smell with trash or mud or something, are they still able to locate you?”

“You can camouflage yourself among them.” Clem stated. “I’ve done it a bunch of times. If you cut one open and get the gunk all over you, and you stay calm and don’t make noise, they can’t tell. You can walk right through a herd of them.”

“Amazing… who taught you about that?” Ford continued to write, fascinated.

“My friend Lee…” Clem looked away as she realized she had said something that would invite in more questions than she cared to answer. “He’s gone now. Sometimes they go dormant, you know.”

“Oh?” Ford wisely accepted the change in subject.

“Yeah. They’ll just lay down wherever they are, usually more in the shade or inside, and just lay there. Until you disturb them. It’s dangerous, they just look dead until you’re practically on top of them.”

“Yeah, like this!” AJ got on the ground of the office and lay down motionless on his belly. Rosie snuffled at him and wagged her tail in a confused manner before sitting down and panting as AJ jumped up and made quite realistic walker sounds before bursting into laughter. Ford let out a hearty chuckle and even Clem couldn’t help but smile.

“Well, thank you. If you think of anything else later, let me know.” Ford dismissed the children and watched them. On his notebook where he had been writing his walker research he had written “Clem’s friend, Lee.”

Clem inspected her hat as she lay in bed. She could hear the others asleep around her and even hear Rosie’s doggy snores from the foot of her bed. The large dog rested her wide head on Clem’s remaining shin and put her body under the stump to keep it elevated. It was quite comfortable, but Clem couldn’t sleep. She put the hat down on her nightstand and shut her eyes, determined to try anyway.

_Beeep_

_Beeeeeeeep_

_Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep_

_The horn rang and a couple of stray walkers on the sidewalk stopped and looked over in their dumb, perplexed manner before continuing on. Clem idly shook a rattle in front of the baby AJ strapped to her chest. He was too little to sit in a seat on his own, so Clem wore him when they were in the car. The problem walker, the one failing to cross the road and instead standing unsteadily in front of their hood, didn’t budge._

_“Come on, ya stupid fucker…” the driver, Clem’s companion Kenny muttered under his breath._

_“Can’t we just run him over?” Clem asked._

_“No, look at that jacket. Those spikes’d fuck up our tires.” Kenny shook his head. “We just have to wait for this guy to decide to move on.”_

_The walker then surprisingly gently lowered itself and lay down in front of the car. Kenny stared, his one remaining eye widening slightly. Clem stared too, as AJ made a contented noise, mouthing on the rattle. Kenny put his head down on the steering wheel._

_“My life is a fuckin’ tragic comedy…”_

_“Well, now the spikey parts are on the ground, so maybe we can run him over.” Clem suggested._

_“Hey, yeah. See ya in hell, shitbird!” Kenny announced, backing up to gain speed before flooring it and running over the dormant walker. Clem smiled, happy to have AJ and Kenny, to be in a little family._

* * *

Ford came into the lab where Dipper was working to label the diagram on the white board with all the vertebrae and parts of the brain, for practice.

“If there is rift activity around here, that means we may end up with more refugees. I’m sure Fiddleford won’t mind, there’s more than enough room here for them, if the decide to stay or otherwise. We have to be vigilant and catch both humans and walkers before they reach tourists or people in town, otherwise the pathogen will begin to spread in our dimension as well.”

“O-oh.” Dipper considered that. “Maybe you should like, tell the president or something that like, the way to cure it is the antibiotics.”

“I need the research on the pathogen to back it up before I can make such a proposal, Dipper, and it would be the CDC or WHO whom I would report to.” Ford sat on one of the lab stools. “I’ll have to inform the existing refugees of this possibility, so they can be prepared to meet others from similar circumstances.”

“It better be someone Clementine knows, or she’ll just be more suspicious of you…” Dipper shrugged and wrote _Lumbar_ on a section of the diagram spine’s lower back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story takes place in 2013. 2020 Ford would have donated all his gloves and equipment to hospitals for COVID-19 treatment, don't worry!


	4. Space AND Time

Lately, life had been shit for Kenny. One day, he and his family had set out on a trip back home from his sister in law’s house. It was a nice day and it was spring.

In five-ish years, Kenny’s life had gone from that to this: dragging himself along a hiking path, unable to move his legs, and therefore unable to run from the stupid, goddamn living dead. He was supposed to be dead by now. Or at least, feeling sick from a bite. He didn’t know why he was trying to scoot along the path, or where he would end up. It was some feral being inside him that told him to try, to live.

“Goddamn unfailable human will…” he muttered out loud, stopping to rest for a moment. He lay with his cheek resting on the cool dirt, wondering if it was worth it to get back up and continue. The kids had run off at his command, he had distracted the walkers so they could get away. He would probably never see Clementine or that baby again…

Kenny’s eye shot open as he heard rapid steps- too rapid to be a walker. A group of what seemed to be gangly, dirty teenagers soon stood around him, staring. There was silence as they eyed each other before Kenny spoke:

“Um. Can you go get help, maybe? Your adults? Promise I’m not bit.”

The teens responded by mumbling amongst themselves and then pairing up, grabbing Kenny’s legs, and beginning to drag him backwards in some direction. Naturally, he protested,

“Hey! Come on, be careful, it’s my back! You’ll fuck it up more!”

The one not dragging loped along beside them and offered what seemed to be half of a raw rabbit to Kenny.

“Um, I’m good, no thanks.” He resigned to his fate. _This may as well happen_, he thought. _Killed by feral teenagers in the woods. What a way to go._

Soon enough, though a small shack by the lakeside was approached, and the non-dragging one gestured to his companions to stop, and then shushed them with, what Kenny noticed in alarm, was a sharply clawed finger. In fact, Kenny realized, every one of these kids’ reassuring grins was sharply fanged and flanked with glowing white eyes. Before he could process and accept this as his newly updated manner of death, the door of the shack opened, as the leader had gone and knocked on it while Kenny was having a minor crisis about their claws.

Tate McGucket generally kept to himself. If it were up to him and he didn’t need to make a living and have a house to live in, he would just live in a cabin alone and fish. However, because he worked at such a heavily tourist-y place as Gravity Falls, he was constantly calling for emergency services for cryptid attacks. Particularly the killbillies, which were commonly described as “raccoons that prey on human blood.” So, when Tate was woken up by some of the wily young male killbillies, he was about to be mad. Instead, he saw four of them standing around looking at what seemed to be a homeless man lying on the ground.

“Uh, you okay, sir?” Tate asked, dumbfounded. Usually, the groups of young adult cryptids hunted and caused mischief, not brought injured people out of the woods.

“My back’s fucked. Could use a doctor, if ya got one.” Kenny responded, thankful to be speaking to a normal looking adult.

“I’ll uh, call the doctor. His name’s Pines, Stanford Pines. He lives up on the hill there in my dad’s property.” Tate turned to leave for a moment before turning back to address the killbillies, “I got him. Thanks for not eating him.”

“They were gonna eat me?” Kenny asked, startled as Tate resumed his backtracking into the house. A creature which appeared to be a walking, chicken-sized campfire scuttled up to Kenny on its odd little wood-like legs and sat, radiating warmth exactly as a fire should. Its beady little eyes blinked at him as he stared. “Er… Hi there, little guy…”

* * *

Ford walked past the living area, pulling on his trench coat as he went. Before heading out the door he turned to stop Clementine who was crutching after him at quite some speed.

“Clementine, you have to go sit down. You’ve been popping your stitches and making it even more time before you can have a prosthetic!” he scolded her.

“Shouldn’t have given me crutches if you didn’t want me up. Let me go with you.” She insisted.

“No, Clem. Stay here, and rest. Not only is rift tracking dangerous for an able bodied person, you are by no means able bodied right now!”

Before the argument could continue, Stan and Tate came through the door, holding Kenny in a makeshift stretcher.

“I’m never taking your pager anywhere again.” Stan grunted.

“Let me see! Dr. Pines!” Clem protested as Ford grabbed her by the shoulders.

“In bed, Clementine.” He said briskly. Over Ford’s shoulder, Clem caught a glimpse of a familiar cap and a man with an eyepatch.

“Kenny!” she gasped, fighting Ford harder.

“Clementine!” Ford held her firmly. “Do you recognize him?”

“It’s Kenny. He’s a friend, looked after me and AJ for a while… I don’t know how he’s alive!” she frantically explained, still trying to dodge Ford to run/crutch after the stretcher. Ford still held her back.

“Clementine, you need to go sit down. I’ll be sure to tell Kenny that you’re here, and safe, and _following medical advice_.” He smiled as she finally took a deep breath and relented, crutching slowly and somewhat sullenly back into the living area to sit on her daybed.

* * *

“Clementine? Is that Clementine?” Kenny demanded of Ford as soon as he could see him.

“Yes, and she told me your name is Kenny.” Ford attempted to be as reassuring as possible. “I hear you’ve hurt your back. Let me x-ray it.”

“You have power?” Kenny asked, looking around at the section of the vast basement laboratory that Ford called the 'medical lab.' "Why do you have Clementine?!" he demanded.

“Do you know how you got here?” Ford asked.

“I haven’t been sure how I’ve ended up anywhere in the last five years, sir.” Kenny responded, joking, but with a testy edge to his voice indicating he still very much wanted to know why Ford had Clementine in this house.

“Well, you are no longer in your home dimension. Are you familiar with the idea of transdimensional travel?” Ford asked, trying to remain calm in the hopes it would soothe the survivor.

“Like, uh… _Sliders_? I fell into a new dimension?” Kenny suddenly felt too bewildered to be mad that this random old guy had Clementine and presumably AJ. _That has to be bullshit,_ he thought. But he had basically fallen through the ground and found himself nowhere near the car crash and group of walkers...

“Yes, that’s the idea.” Ford smiled, glad that his discussion with Kenny would be simpler than the one he gave to the kids. He explained to Kenny how a deity must have thought he and these kids were important enough to save. Kenny, now resigned to how weird this entire ordeal was and would probably continue to be agreed that this was as likely as anything else happening these days. Then, Ford looked at the x-ray done of Kenny’s spine.

“Well, you’re in luck.” Ford gestured to the x-ray. Kenny, not by any means a medical professional, did not understand what he was looking at.

“Thank God, my spine’s still there!” he joked.

Ford continued, “The swelling is the biggest problem you’re experiencing- it’s putting pressure on the spinal cord here and causing paralysis. The injury to the spine itself is a relatively superficial crack that should heal with minimal issue. Once the swelling goes down, you should regain most of your limb movement. There may be some lasting nerve damage, but you will walk again.”

“Holy shit.” Kenny had gone from angry, to bewildered, to resigned, to amused at his own humor to shocked. “You have any idea how it felt to think I’d never walk again in a world where that gets you eaten?”

“Not fun, I imagine.” Ford turned off the x-ray display light. “You’ll have to stay here for two weeks of quarantine, to make sure you don’t spread the pathogen to the rest of us, or re-infect the kids, but then you can go and live your life as normal, or you can stay here. But for now, you have to rest. I'll have my partner send a droid with some food and water, and then you should lay down."

As Ford left, he decided to ask one more thing:

“Could… you perhaps at some point tell me about Clementine? She won’t talk herself.”

“I’m not in the business of tellin’ others’ baggage, sorry. You’ll have to get it from her yourself.” Kenny responded, settling in the hospital bed. “All I can tell ya is that I’ve known her since the beginning. She’s a sweet kid, under all the toughening the world’s given her.”

* * *

“I haven’t seen Kenny since I was about thirteen.” Clem admitted. “And he was being swarmed by walkers and couldn’t use his legs. I thought he was bit, too, because he shouted...”

“I did find some evidence of a bite to that leather belt of his, but it didn’t puncture any skin. A lucky bite for him. Still would have been frighteningly close.” Ford mused. “And, well, rifts can open in space _and _time, so it’s entirely possible that anyone from any time of your world’s apocalyptic state could appear.”

Clem’s eyes widened for a moment and she started to ask, “Does that mean…” before trailing off, once more deciding she was about to invite in too many questions. Ford sighed, knowing from experience that asking her what she was saying would lead nowhere.

“Kenny thinks he's pretty funny. He, uh, copes with humor?” Ford changed the subject to Kenny again.

“Yeah, these days.” Clem agreed. “It took him fucking forever to stop coping by being angry. It's still pretty hit or miss but he jokes sometimes.”

“I suppose we all improve at our own pace.” Ford mused, still trying to think of a way to get through to Clementine.

“When can I go see him?”

“Well…” Ford considered. “I think I may have a solution for being able to use my lab space for his quarantine, since there is only one of him. I’ll try and get that set up shortly, so tomorrow morning when you both have rested some, you can see him.”

Clem seemed satisfied with the answer and leaned back into her bed. Ford sighed. He would have to bring out the big guns, it seemed.


	5. The Big Guns

Kenny was now staying in the isolation chamber Ford had (built of course, by Fiddleford) for dangerous vapors or cryptids that excreted poisonous gas, or other such airborne dangers. It worked just as well to isolate Kenny’s output of pathogen-infested air from the rest of the lab, which allowed Ford to more or less continue his research on the pathogen as normal. Along the way, he had tried something new: Asking Clem and AJ about themselves while they got to look at his lab and jarred specimens. The theory was that in the childrens' excitement to explore the lab, they would forget that they were supposed to be keeping secrets. Ford had confidence it would work with the young AJ, but not so much the older and wiser Clementine. It was worth an attempt, though.

“I’ve seen that before. That’s the engine.” AJ pointed out a machine.

“I don’t think it’s a car engine, buddy. Looks like it, I guess.” Clem partially agreed, looking at a book of Ford’s specimen sketches nearby.

“It’s for spinning our samples around.” Ford clarified. “It’s called a centrifuge.”

“Sentry-fuge.” AJ repeated, fascinated. “Why do you spin them around?”

“It mixes them extra well.” Ford explained. “How did you and Clem get to the school, AJ, can you tell me that story?”

AJ looked over at Clem, asking silent permission. She shrugged and nodded at him, clearly deciding this information was not too damning.

“We got into a car accident. We were looking for food in an old building, I remember it because we went back later to get more food, and there was an explosion.”

“The previous owners had trapped their food supply. A grenade, I think. It came rolling out, making a ticking noise, and I knew it was gonna explode so I got us outta there.” Clem clarified.

“And the noise made tons of walkers come.” AJ agreed. “Clem stabbed one with her keys.” He thought about it. “Then we rolled down a big hill, I was strapped in, so I was okay, but Clem got slammed around a bunch. The other kids heard the crash from the school and came and helped us.”

It was quiet for a while before AJ, staring at the Walker Parasite structure in its jar, spoke again.

“Dr. Pines… Even if you’re crazy about the dimension stuff, you know a lot. Can I ask you something that has to do with a long story I also have to tell?”

“Of course, AJ. If Clem will let me hear it.” Ford smiled good-naturedly at Clem who shrugged. AJ didn’t turn to face any of them.

“A couple days after we got to the school, there was a big fight and I thought the leader, Marlon, was gonna hurt Clem. So I shot him in the head.” The little boy continued, staring intently at the jar in front of him. “And on the bridge, I shot Tenn in the neck because otherwise both he _and_ Louis would have died.”

Ford had stopped working to stared at AJ’s rigid stature across the room. Clem was watching too, as they both thought about this turn of events.

“So, Dr. Pines, since you know I’ve shot people, do you think I’m a murderer?” AJ asked.

“AJ…” Clem started, frowning. Ford approached the boy to see that facing the jar, he looked horribly guilty and confused.

“I think that you are more violent than others your age, but I think that it is a product of your upbringing.” Ford responded.

“What’s that mean? ‘Product of my upbringing?’”

“It means that you are only violent because it is how you have to be to survive. It means you were born into a very dangerous place, and the skills you have are all to help you survive there, not necessarily to interact with others properly. You will learn. You know,” Ford pointed out the walker brain, “Your brain, here, is very squishy and malleable. It means that it’s very easy to shape and teach new things. You will learn all the new skills that will help you survive now; it may just take you… oh… how old are you again?” Ford smiled as the boy responded,

“I’m six! You know that, Dr. Pines, _you_ told me that!” Even so, AJ was smiling. “It’s good. That I’m maybe not a murderer.”

“A murderer and someone who has committed a murder are two different things.” Ford agreed. Clem let out an agreeing _Hm_ at that that Ford chose to ignore for the moment. As he sat back down, he looked across the counter to Clem. She sighed.

“I’ll give you his history. Just because you _are _really smart behind the crazy.”

“I’ve been hearing that one my whole life.” Ford joked. “Just tell me who his parents were, and maybe any particularly scary experiences he’s had.”

“I was eleven or so when he was born.” Clem began. “I was separated from my group and by myself for the first time since the beginning, and I was bit by a stray dog, and I was hungry, and tired, and I basically collapsed on the first group of survivors I met. Two of them were AJ’s parents. His mom was super pregnant, and they were running away from a group leader-turned-asshole.” She paused to think of more of the story, as Ford noted that down. “Rebecca didn’t like me all that much at first,” Clem continued. “Alvin was nice to me from the beginning. He gave me a juice box, and the bandages for the dog bite since not even their goddamn doctor could tell it was _not a walker bite_, and they put me in the shed overnight to make sure.”

“The scar on your left arm?” Ford asked, getting a sense of which of Clementine’s wounds had been this dog bite. He didn't mention the stitch marks on the wound- he decided that the doctor must have given them to her.

“Yeah. I hated dogs for a long time, until I met Rosie.”

“It’s okay that they were running from an asshole.” AJ piped up. “Kenny beat his face in, ‘cuz that guy was the person who hit him so hard his eye came out.”

“It was pretty gross.” Clem agreed, smiling a little. “AJ was born, and his mom was weak. She died a few days later because we couldn’t stop moving. It was snowy, we were somewhere up north, I don’t know where. Wherever Wellington is, I guess. She turned while she was holding him. Kenny shot the walker because I saw it and shouted. Me and Kenny and this other girl, Jane, we all took him in and moved on.” She fidgeted with the book in front of her. “When he was about two, it was just me and him and Kenny, we got into the car accident that hurt Kenny’s back. So it was just me and him left. Right after that, AJ started to get sick. I thought maybe it was the flu because we all get the flu every year, but it didn’t go away. He was coughing and coughing and he was burning up. I knew I needed help, so I asked these people, the New Frontier,” she showed the brand on her arm above her scar for just a second before continuing, “and they first denied him the medicine, but then when I stole the medicine to give it to him anyway, because I can’t just accept that my baby is gonna die, they threw me out, and took him away, to die away from me.”

Clem took a shuddery sigh. “They said I was too young and irresponsible to be a mother. Apparently, I wasn’t too young to throw out into the wilderness, though.” She looked back up, her amber eyes gleaming with venom even at the memory. “I got him back, though. He survived his illness and they sent him to an outpost on a ranch. They were being raided, I think, so it was just in time that I got him, anyway. And so, then we just started driving, looking for a place to live.”

“I remember the ranch.” AJ poked at a preserved skull on a shelf. “There was fire, and a lady with a big hole in her face. It smelled like blood. But fresh blood, not walker blood.”

“Huh.” Ford observed. “Er, Clementine, can I speak with AJ without you present for a moment? It’s customary for medical professionals to ask the parental figure to leave in case the child has any secrets they need help with.”

“Alright. But he’s armed if you try anything.” Clem warned, only half-joking. Much to Fiddleford’s horror, AJ carried a pistol which was just sized for his little hands. It was his, and he was very proud of knowing how to use and maintain it. Clem hadn’t offered much on her reasoning behind giving it to him besides the fact that they had come from a dangerous world full of aggressive undead creatures. Ford agreed with that reasoning and Fiddleford insisted that she really should have waited until he was at least ten.

After Clem had left, Ford beckoned AJ up onto the stool she had occupied.

“So, do you have any fun Clementine stories?” He asked, smiling. AJ nodded, happy to be able to talk to an adult like they were adults. He began describing Clem’s stories immediately:

The walkers had come when Clementine was around eight. Her parents had been on a trip far away, so she was with a babysitter.

“A babysitter is someone who parents used to pay to watch a little kid when they were away, Clem says.” AJ clarified. "Her babysitter had red hair and she went to school in Marietta. I don't know where Marietta is, though."

The babysitter was bitten, so Clem fled her home and hid in her tree house for a few days, waiting for her parents to come home. This, AJ said, was when she met her friend Lee. Lee had come from the highway, looking for help,

“Since nobody knew what walkers were yet.” AJ specified. "Lee was in a car accident, probably because of the walkers. His leg was all messed up."

Lee had taken Clementine to a farm to stay, out away from the city of Atlanta, because even then, cities were dangerous. Kenny and his family were there too. Ford had already learned from Kenny that he had previously had a wife and a child who was a few months younger than Clementine, but neither had made it to the first year of the outbreak. Kenny, frustratingly, would not really explain what had happened to them.

AJ explained that they had gotten on a train at some point to go to Savannah, which was the city Clem’s parents had last been in, and also a way to get to the ocean, which Kenny really wanted. While they were on the train, AJ said, that was where Lee taught Clem how to survive- to cut her hair as to be less grabbable and to fire a gun. Clem said riding the train was fun, but it eventually drew a huge herd of walkers that wasn’t that far behind them. Clem didn’t find her parents, and Lee was bitten while they were trying to get out of the herd.

“She didn’t let Lee turn.” AJ said solemnly. “I was gonna have to do it too if you hadn’t come.” He looked up at Ford. “Do you know how to stop someone with a bite from turning?”

Ford did know, but he wanted to hear it in the child’s words. “How, AJ?”

The boy put his chubby little hands up, pointing in a gun gesture at Ford’s head, before pretend-firing and saying, solemnly again, “Bang. No walker.”

Ford almost didn’t want to hear what other stories AJ had about Clem, but he prompted the boy on.

"She had to put the stitches in her dog bite by herself, you know." AJ observed. "She said it hurt a lot but she was brave about it."

Ford continued to scribble in his notebook: Clem had walked through many herds of walkers, which was probably a terrifying experience. She had shot some people. AJ could or would not specify which people. AJ proudly recounted the story of the two of them and the dog torturing a man for information at the school:

"We beat him up until he told us where the boat was and then we put a knife in his head!"

Finally, AJ was done. Ford finished his notes and shut the notebook.

“Well, thank you, AJ. I’m going to go find Clementine and talk to her.”

“Okay. But don’t tell her I told you all the stories, she’ll probably be mad. She doesn’t trust you.” AJ agreed, looking at the book of sketches now.

“Well, I hope that will change very soon.” Ford responded as he headed up into the manor to find the teen.


	6. Breaking Point

“I can’t fucking believe you would go to AJ behind my back like that.” Clementine was up on her crutches in a full defensive stance as Ford sat calmly.

“He told me you may be upset.”

“Yeah. I’m fucking upset. AJ is _little_, Dr. Pines. He doesn’t fucking know how to keep secrets and you took advantage of that to fucking… get into my head!?”

“Is ‘fucking’ the only cuss word you know?” Ford asked, mildly amused.

“Fuck you.” Clem responded, crossing her arms as best as she could with her crutches. “I trusted you to talk to him, and now I see I shouldn’t have. Fuck off and leave me and my group alone.”

“Clementine…” Ford started, but he stopped when the girl glared at him again. “Can you at least confirm the information I have?”

“Yes. I’m fucked up. I was eight, my babysitter got bit, my friend Duck was bit, my caretaker Lee was also bit, Kenny was in a car accident and _fucking _bit…” she was pacing, clearly highly agitated and, Ford suspected, not just because of her anger. “Even I’ve been bit. We all get bit. We all fucking die, Dr. Pines.”

“Well, you didn’t.” Ford observed, indicating Clem’s stump leg. “I was able to save your life. And Kenny’s.”

“You have nothing to do with it. Luck’s what it is. It’s what it’s always been for me. I’m just lucky enough to not die, to find people who won’t hurt me for a while, to find a couple biscuits to shove in my face before we have to run because they’re feeding us people. You know. Apocalypse shit.” Clem huffed, having exerted all her stamina pacing around the lab. She sat herself on the edge of one of the counters, very obviously leaving herself ready to run again, even as she breathed heavily from exertion.

“People?” Ford asked, not entirely as shocked as he should have been.

“Yeah. Fucked up. I was little, so I don’t know much about it but this family in Georgia was catching and eating people. They tried to feed us a guy’s leg, and then when Lee found out about it, they locked us in a meat locker. We got out and they’re all long dead but…” Clem shut up, remembering that she didn’t owe Ford anything.

“I’ve been fed people against my will.” Ford agreed. “It’s sickening.”

“If there’s no walkers here, why were you eating people?” Clem asked, thinking she had a hole in Ford’s story.

“I’ve been some places.” Ford responded.

“Kenny’s killed people.” Clem changed the subject. Kenny was asleep in the quarantine cell, laying still and, Clem guessed, healing his back up.

“Like who?” Ford asked, willing to entertain the change in subject to keep Clementine calmer.

“Jane.”

“The one you were with when you took in AJ?”

“Yeah.” Clem sighed. “I… I could have shot at one of them to stop the fight, but I didn’t know what to do, I was eleven, I was hurt myself, I…” she looked away from Ford, guilt on her face. “I don’t even know if Kenny feels bad about it. He never talked about it.”

“I do.” Kenny spoke up from his bed. “But I can’t even say I didn’t mean to. In that second, thinkin’ she’d gotten AJ killed and with my eye hurtin’ and everyone thinkin’ I’d gone off the deep end… I meant it. But I know I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t’ve killed that kid. She didn’t look too much older than you are now, Clem… I shouldn’t’ve done it.”

They were all quiet for a while, before Ford brought the subject back to Clementine:

“Clementine… When Kenny first arrived here, you were about to ask me a question, and stopped. Did you want to know if Lee might come to the manor?”

The teen didn’t look at Ford as she responded, “Lee didn’t deserve to die. He was a good person and if anyone deserves a ‘second chance’ like you say we have, it’s him.”

“Lee found a scared little girl he didn’t know during the world’s biggest crisis and immediately took her in ‘til her parents came along and for good if they didn’t.” Kenny agreed. “I don’t know if I would’ve done the same.”

“It was my fault he got bit.” Clem said, still not looking at either Ford or Kenny. “I ran away, in Savannah, to look for my parents. He was bit while they were looking for me.”

“Clem, it isn’t your fault…” Kenny argued.

“Kenny, I never told you about how I got kidnapped.” Clem turned finally to look at one of the adults. “We stole from that station wagon after the dairy. The guy who got another walkie talkie was the guy who owned that car. We stole from them, and he lost his whole family.”

“So he kidnapped you?” Kenny shifted himself up into a sitting position. “That’s fucked. Isn’t your fault. He’s the crazy one.”

“He was crazy.” Clem agreed. “He thought I’d be safer with him then with Lee. He told his wife’s walker’s head all the time how I wasn’t _their_ daughter, but I would be good enough. He tried to kill Lee when he found me.”

“Clem, you have to understand, you and Duck were starving, I’m sure if he knew that…” Kenny looked upset by the news. His actions had gotten a family killed.

“His kids were hungry too, Kenny.” Clem said firmly. “But that doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t have gotten me if I hadn’t run away, and then Lee wouldn’t have been bitten.” she looked back down. “That’s just how it is for me. I get people killed.”

“Clementine…” Ford started.

“Clem…” Kenny began at the same time, both intending to soothe the teen. Instead, her head snapped up and she glared at both of them.

“No. Fuck you guys. It’s my fault.” Clem stood again, in her defensive, angry stance. “It’s my fault. All I do is get people killed. Lee, and Ben and Omid and Sarita and Sarah and that guy I accidentally shot in Prescott, hey, probably the entire settlement there! And everyone who died to the herd in Richmond! And every kid at the school that died? Wouldn’t have died if me and AJ had never stayed there. And Louis’s hand? Violet’s eyes? Omar’s leg? All my fault!” Clem’s chest was heaving as she kept on, through the big cartoon-like tears that streamed down her face now. “All of them are my fucking fault so get the fuck away from me before I get you,” she pointed at Kenny, “actually dead, and you,” she pointed at Ford, “killed.”

Before either adult could say anything in comfort, Clem launched on another tirade: “And that’s not even everyone I lost that _wasn’t_ my fault- Duck was my friend, Christa and Pete and Nick and Luke and Alvin and Rebecca were good people! Tripp was a good guy! Mariana was ten fucking years old! I haven’t seen Javi and his family in years, all I can do is pray Richmond is still okay. Arvo didn’t do anything wrong and fuck you Kenny for beating on him that way!” A deep, shuddering breath, “I thought. For six months. That AJ died of the fucking flu and I would never see him again, not even get to hold him and make sure he wouldn’t fucking turn myself. I never got to even say goodbye to my own fucking parents!”

“Clementine…” Ford murmured. Kenny didn’t know what to do and simply sat in his bed and beheld Clem’s breakdown.

“They fucking fed me people when I was _eight_ years old!” She sobbed, now on her knees on the ground despite her injury. “I saw Lee pitchfork a man in the chest when I was _eight_. I learned to fire a gun when I was _eight_ and the very next thing I did was shoot the guy who kidnapped me and tried to kill my caretaker. Who I then had to shoot. Nobody even ever told me what happened to Katjaa, there was gunshots and then everyone else moved on! I gave myself,” she held up her arm with the large dog bite scar across it, “these _fucking_ stitches when I was _eleven_. I saw some dick smash my latest caretaker’s face in with a fucking walkie talkie! That scar on my chest? A hunting rifle. I was also eleven when that happened.”

Clem looked tearfully up at Ford, barely catching her breath between blurbs of speech: “You want us to live normal lives, Dr Pines? We can’t. I can’t. I’m too fucked up by all this bullshit this fucking walker outbreak stuff put me through. Work with Willy and AJ, they’re small, they’ll get over it. I’m a lost cause. I’ll never be normal again.”

With that, Clementine hung her head and put her hands over her face to muffle her crying. Ford supposed this could be an instinct to prevent excess noise in a world where it was dangerous, but it could also simply be her trying to comfort herself. Either way, he put a hand gently on her shoulder, as comfortingly as he could make the gesture feel. They sat like that for a good long time, with Clem slowly wearing herself out and Ford letting her cry. Kenny had decided this was outside his range of emotional abilities and had turned to rest more, letting Ford care for the distraught girl. Finally, as Clem’s sobs calmed, Ford spoke to her.

“Clementine, you don’t have to be ‘normal.’ All that matters here is that you are safe now, and therefore you can process all of this.”

Clem looked up at him and gave a very snotty snuffle. Ford smiled encouragingly and continued,

“With one thing after another, such as in a high-stakes, traumatic situation like a world ending plague, you cannot stop to process each event before the next is upon you. But here, you don’t have to worry about that. Nothing else is coming. You can relax and you can think about everything, and cry and rage and scream if you have to. Whatever helps you to move past being that scared little girl in a world full of the undead.”

“I’m fucked…” Clem mumbled, snuffling again. She attempted to wipe her runny nose on her bare arm with minimal success.

“No, Clementine, you’re traumatized. Would you tell AJ that he’s ‘fucked’ because he worries about his kills?”

“No.” she responded, her voice still small and cracking from her crying.

“Exactly.” Ford helped Clem up into a chair to properly elevate her stump. He handed her a box of tissues and she began to mop up the mess of snot and tears on her face. “I’m traumatized too, you know.” He admitted.

“How?” she asked around a tissue.

“When I was a new, young researcher, there was an accident and I ended up floating aimlessly through dimensions for thirty years of my life. I only came home about a year ago, and I’ve been trying to re-acclimate myself to being safe ever since.” He explained. “That’s how I was fed human meat, you see. In some alien cultures, ‘Human Veal’ is a delicacy.” He almost smiled at the memory, but Clementine could see he was still very upset by it. “They didn’t think I was actually a human, given…” he displayed his six fingered hand. “I’ve also been hunted for the pet and slave trades for my deformity. I’m unique, and that generally leads to trouble, even among other humans.”

“Did people make fun of you in school?” Clem asked, her voice growing stronger as she calmed.

“All the time. I was lucky- my brother was always there to help me. Not so much when I was between dimensions.” He swallowed hard, growing nervous as he recounted the next memory. “This,” he showed off a pink scar that was about two inches wide and went around his entire wrist, “was given to me by an incredibly evil, ruthless being who is thankfully dead now. He inhabited a place literally between dimensions, called the Nightmare Realm. He had it out for me in particular, and well, when he got a hold of me, it was never pretty. These electric burns are not the only scars he left on me, merely the most recent.” Ford seemed to study Clem’s face as he continued, “My brother and I went on a sailing trip at the end of last summer, shortly after I’d been injured. I learned the hard way that the static in the air during a thunderstorm…” his hands were starting to shake, even remembering the sensation.

Clementine, in her first show of any affection towards the scientist put her hand on his, steadying the trembling. “I get it. I can’t stand barbecue sauce. It’s what they fed us at the dairy, was barbecue.” She agreed, almost smiling a little when Ford looked up at her face in surprise.

Kenny, who had been more contemplating his own life then ignoring Clementine, it turned out, spoke up again.

“Clem, I don’t think it’s really your fault that Sarita got killed. You cut her arm ‘cuz it’s what you thought might help her live, and I had no right to shout at you like I did, even if my eye hurt like fuck. And Katjaa… you were too young to know at the time. But she shot herself. Couldn’t stand to see Duck die and then live without him, so she went to meet him in Heaven instead.”

Ford sighed, shaking off his own sadness and anxiety to reassure his refugees.

“You all have a lot of baggage. And that’s alright. Clementine, you and your group are all safe here, and I want to help. I really, really hope you are able to tell them that I’m not out to hurt you, after all this.”

“Am I part of the group?” Kenny asked.

“Yeah. You’re my dad.” Clem casually said, smiling at him with her eyes red and face covered in the tracks of her tears. “You and Lee are my dads. Forever.”

“What about me?” Ford asked, quirking an eyebrow.

“You’re growing on me.” Clem admitted.

“Hm. I’ll take it.” Ford smiled affectionately at her and ruffled her hair. “Let’s look at your leg, I’m almost positive all that movement has opened _something_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think we can all tell Clementine firsthand that a world ending plague is absolutely a traumatic experience.


	7. The First Outing

Time passed quickly in the lives of the healing refugees, as it always seemed to have ever since the first day the dead had started walking. The time of year was midsummer, and the small town was buzzing with activity. Clementine and her group of fellow kids had been invited by Dipper and Mabel to come hang out with their group of friends, the first outing the kids had experienced outside the manor property. Kenny, looking to make friends of his own demographic, was going fishing on the lake with Tate McGucket.

Tate had not intended to bring Kenny along, but Fiddleford in his usual sort of airheaded kindness had suggested it.

“Kenny’s gotta get out more, and maybe you can tell him about the trout!” he had urged.

“Dad, I don’t know, I think Kenny might have a hard time because of his eye…” Tate expressed hesitation, looking Kenny over with his eyes covered by his bangs as per usual. Fiddleford reached up to brush the hair from his son’s face and was politely but firmly stopped with a hand on his wrist.

“Well, Stanford says it’s good for them to get out. Besides, he ain’t that much older than you, maybe y’all can bond!” Fiddleford implored his son to socialize. Tate’s expression changed only slightly but his father seemed relieved.

“Alright. But I don’t think he should handle a hook with one eye.”

“Er,” Kenny piped up, finally, “I was a commercial fisherman before all the dead started walking, I know how to use a hook.” He thought about it for a moment. “Although, my freshwater fishing’s a bit rusty. You know the area?”

“I’ve been fishing here for years.” Tate responded. “I read every book about lake and river fishing I could as a kid, and I check on the almanacs every year.” He paused for a moment, almost hesitating to say the next sentence, “My absolute favorites to catch are rainbow trout, but the best from the lake are the lake trout, which aren’t actually really trout, they’re chars.” He considered further. “They’re invasive so there’s loads of ‘em here in Gravity Falls and almost no county regulation. The park rangers don’t like coming out here.”

“I used to catch all kinds of tropical fish, the biggest were the tuna.” Kenny responded. “But as a kid I’d fish in the streams and swamps. Catfish, mostly.”

“See, y’all are getting along already!” Fiddleford excitedly announced.

“Hm.” Tate responded. “You ever stuck your hands in the water and caught the catfish that way?”

“Oh sure.” Kenny chuckled. “Worried my poor mom sick with all the scratches on my arms.”

The two continued to trade stories of their fishing adventures as they headed out the door to Tate’s truck, bound for the lake. Kenny walked with somewhat of a limp due to the injury to his back, but he didn’t need any assistance anymore, and was glad to be rid of the cane Ford had made him use.

Meanwhile, Clementine and her group were nervously meeting on top of a hill in a graveyard with a group of local kids. Dipper gestured at them and spoke,

“Er, everyone, this is Clementine, and her group, Violet, Louis, Ruby, Aasim, Omar, Willy and AJ, and uh, Clem’s dog, Rosie.”

The large dog sat, patiently panting at Clem’s side. AJ held on to Clem’s loose pant leg on her stump leg side, clearly nervous to be meeting new people. The freckled, red haired teen Dipper had primarily addressed his words to smiled, though.

“Ah, cool! I’m Wendy. Where’re you guys from? I know Dipper and Mabel are from California.”

“Uh.” Clem stammered. She was originally from Atlanta, she knew that. She didn’t, however, even have a birthday for AJ, let alone a place he was from, and all the others were from different places, and it got very complicated very fast.

“We’re from back east. We met at a boarding school.” Louis swept in suavely. “Love the hair. I always appreciate a good redhead.”

Ruby squinted so incredulously at this that it was nearly audible. Wendy just laughed the comment off.

“Yeah, my whole family has hair like this. My dad sheds like a big dog! Red hairs all over.” She gestured to Clementine and her crutches. “What happened? If you don’t mind telling the story.”

“Um.” Clem started again, eyes wide as she realized she was nowhere ready for this sort of interaction.

“Was it a logging mill accident? I have a great uncle who lost his arm in one of those machines.” Wendy pressed.

“Hey, come on, don’t scare her.” The girl with the purple hair and her face in her phone protested. She looked up properly at the group for a moment. “I like your eyepatch. It matches your outfit. It’s cool.” She complimented Violet, who was in fact wearing a deep purple eyepatch to match her new shirt.

“Oh, uh, thanks. My face got burned.” Vi clarified, knowing a question about the visible scars on her face would come next. “The eye under here doesn’t work and looks really fucked up, so I just cover it.”

“A walker bit Clem’s leg.” AJ piped up. “So, we had to cut it off, and then Dr. Pines came and saved her.”

“A walker?” Wendy asked, curious. “What’s that? Some sort of wild animal you have ‘back east?’”

“It’s…” Clem started, and Dipper helped,

“A zombie. She got bit by a zombie. They’re all from an alternate earth dimension where this crazy pathogen runs rampant and if you die or get bitten and then die from the sepsis, you get taken over by this parasite thing that makes you a zombie.”

“Also, none of us really knew what a zombie was before we came here. Nobody said that back home.” Aasim clarified. “I’ve only read a couple of books about Haitian history that mentioned the zombification voodoo practice.”

“One day when I was about eight, the dead just started walking.” Clem agreed. “I made it for a while, but then I was already hurt, and I got bitten right on top of my cuts, and so we had to take the leg off so I would survive.”

“You were eight? Your little brother must’ve not even been born, huh?” Wendy looked fondly at AJ. “Scary.”

“He’s uh, not my brother.” Clem clarified. “I raised him. I sort of consider myself his mom, more than a sibling. Louis is more like my brother.”

“He’s definitely annoying enough to be someone’s sibling.” Vi agreed.

“My parents were killed at the start because they were in a big city, but AJ’s happened to be part of a group that took care of me, and then when they were gone, I took care of him.” Clem gave the simplest version of how she got to be AJ’s caretaker at the age of 17.

“Well,” Wendy grinned. “Robbie’s parents are out of town, and so he’s got the keys to the morgue. Wanna go see some of _our_ dead stuff?”

* * *

“They say the lake trout can get up to about 40 pounds but I’ve only ever seen ones get up to 15, probably because the lake isn’t that big compared to, say, the Great Lakes.” Tate rambled on. “I swear I saw a catfish that was almost as big as a man in one of the rivers that runs through my grandparents’ farm in Tennessee, though, so catfish can get big wherever they are.”

Kenny was nodding along and scanning the dark lake water for any sign of life. Suddenly, he saw it. A large, fishlike shape hovering near enough to their small boat that Kenny decided he could use the net in their boat to catch it. He scooped the tool up and immediately focused on his task.

“Hang on, I see something down there.” He shushed Tate, moving slowly and fluidly so as not to startle it. There was some splashing and thrashing but soon Kenny pulled the net up, and beheld the strange creature within.

It was about the same size as a medium to large lake trout, but it was not one at all. It had a silvery, muscular, finned tail which thrashed and flailed in the net, and this was connected to an almost monkey-like upper body. The thing had big, pitch black eyes, a flat face with two narrow nostrils and a mouth full of sharp little needle teeth. It also had bony, monkey-like long arms and hands which pulled fruitlessly at the net’s fibers. Kenny was dumbfounded.

“What the _fuck_ are you?” he asked the creature, which let out a grinding sort of screech in response, curling its tail against the net, again with little effect.

“Kenny, you ought to put him back.” Tate said firmly. “He isn’t here alone, and we don’t want the others to notice you got him.”

“No, really, what the fuck is this thing? It looks like one of them terrible taxidermy mermaids.” Kenny continued to examine his catch. The creature screeched again, this time a bit more emphatically. Before Kenny could further examine it, a spear made of a sizable stick with a sharp stone bound to the end flew out of the water and nailed its target- Kenny’s shoulder on the side which held the net. He dropped both net and creature over the side in shock and swore loudly.

“That’s what I was telling you.” Tate almost sighed. “Those are sea monkeys. They’re sort of a monkey-freshwater-version of a mermaid. You scooped up one of the small ones, definitely still a juvenile, they’ve got silver tails ‘til they’re pretty old, so no wonder they speared you. They’re usually about a foot longer. They can and do flip the little rowboats out here for fun.”

“Fuck!” Kenny clutched his arm. “Fuckin’… spear fish!?”

“Close enough.” Tate agreed. He took a walkie talkie from its waterproof bag in the boat and spoke into it, “Stanford, we got an injury. One of the sea monkeys speared Kenny.”

Ford’s voice crackled back over the radio:

“Oh dear. They’re bold this year, aren’t they? Don’t let him take the spear out, it’ll cause more damage. I’ll meet you at the bait shop to take him.”

“No more bold than they have been the last five years, but I suppose you wouldn’t know that. I’ll keep him safe.” Tate responded.

* * *

“I said ‘so is this the part where ya’ cut my legs off and feed ‘em to the others’ to Tate here and he didn’t even smile. Tough nut to crack, this guy.” Kenny rambled as Ford inspected his injury. Tate was keeping a watch for any other rogue creatures approaching the injured human, scanning the water and trees as Kenny lay on a simple stretcher on the sand.

“Tate isn’t the most expressive out there. I’m sure he’s amused.” Ford answered, smiling reassuringly at his patient. “That’s really in there. We’ll have to go back to the medical lab and x-ray it to ensure you haven’t been stabbed to the bone.”

“Just my luck, ain’t it?” Kenny, who may have been in shock, continued to ramble. “I survive the fuckin’ apocalypse despite the odds. But! I loose my wife and my son. But! I manage to get the fuck out of a whole herd of the walkin’ dead. But! The only safe place I find is in the fuckin’ mountains! But, then Clementine survived too and I run into her! Oh, they’re runnin’ from some crazy dictator Stalin-wannabe fucker? That’s alright we find the one girl who knows how to get through a herd and there’s one incomin’! Oh. The Stalin-fucker fucked up my eye? I’m lucky I even survived! My girl’s been eaten by the herd ‘cuz the closest one when she got bit was a fuckin’ child? But hey, the rest of the group didn’t die I guess…”

“Kenny,” Ford sighed, unsure of what he planned to say next. “Well, let’s get back to the manor. Er, thank you.” He addressed Fiddleford’s service droids who had hoisted Kenny’s stretcher up onto their flat little heads to carry. The small robots were often deployed to help injured tourists as well as the Coast Guard and other rescue personnel.

“I’m safe even though by all means I should be dead a million times? Clem’s missin’ a fuckin’ leg.” Kenny ended his rant. “Why me?”

“There’s only so much direct effect even the most powerful deities can exert on any given universe.” Ford responded, walking alongside the stretcher-bearing droids. “Your own survival skills and will to live despite the odds is what saved you, not ‘luck’ or ‘the will of God.’” Kenny didn’t look reassured so Ford continued, “The only thing that is the direct result of a deity as far as I can see is your travel here. Everything else was your own skills.”

“Maybe if ‘dumb fuckin’ luck’ was a skill.” Kenny responded. “I mean it. I’m lucky but for every luck I have I lose something else or someone I care about gets hurt or dead.”

“Killed, they get killed.” Ford absent-mindedly corrected.

“Fuck off.”

“Understandable.” Ford realized his error. He squinted as he looked ahead of them. “Is that Clementine and AJ… and the Valentino boy?”

“Clem?” Kenny tried to sit up and was stopped by Ford’s arm across his torso. Ford was looking at Clementine, and then caught site of Robbie, limping, one pant leg soaked in blood at the mid-thigh and hastily bandaged. Clem, he realized, also had a hasty bandage around her left hand, and would have to stop and wince as she crutched along and put pressure on the wound. She also, he noticed, looked quite angry, and AJ walked very sullenly behind them alongside Rosie, who occasionally nudged the little boy’s hand with her nose and wagged her stump of a tail encouragingly if he looked over at her.

“Clementine!” Ford called out, and the girl upon hearing him changed direction to head towards him. “What happened?” He asked when the kids were a suitable amount closer.

“AJ, tell Dr. Pines what you did.” Clem pushed the boy in front of her with the arm that was not required to balance herself in a standing position. The small boy looked up at Ford guiltily.

“I stabbed Robbie in the leg with a knife.” He offered the pocketknife to Ford. It was still bloodied along with the boy’s hand, and, Ford realized, dripped down his forearm, indicating he had hung onto the weapon and let the cut bleed on him. A typical tactic of someone who needed to retrieve their weapon after downing one enemy to down another.

“Why did you do that?” Ford asked, not angry at the child as much as confused.

“He came up behind me. I have a thing about that, you know that, Dr. Pines.” AJ sniffled a little. “We were looking around in a morgue and the dead stuff made me nervous ‘cuz of walkers, and Robbie came up behind me and scared me and all I could think about was how sick Clem got when she was bit and how they took me away from her when I was a baby and…”

“I understand.” Ford assured the boy, and then looked to Clementine. “What happened to your hand?”

“I had to wrestle the knife away from him, and it was already slippery, so I cut myself on the blade pretty bad, and I didn’t even get the fucking knife.”

“It’s mine.” AJ said firmly.

“And that’s true, but I said you’re grounded from knives. Give it to Dr. Pines.” Clem ordered with a very adult-telling-a-child-off edge to her voice. She probably, Ford thought, was copying her mom or even Kenny’s tone when she misbehaved. As AJ deposited the knife sullenly into Ford’s hand, everyone seemed to relax. Clem’s eyes landed for the first time on Kenny and the spear sticking out of his shoulder, and she looked perplexed.

“Kenny, what the fuck happened?” she asked.

“Fuckin’ mermaids with spears live in the lake.” Kenny responded. “I netted one of their babies and so they shot me.”

“You can’t get a fucking break, huh?” Clem leaned over Kenny to be in his view.

“You can’t either. You got cut by a knife you probably gave to that kid!”

“AJ has issues.” Clem shrugged it off.

“I do.” AJ agreed. “But I’m getting better, right Dr. Pines? I’m healing. From the trauma.”

“That’s right. Er, Robbie, can you walk up to the manor? I can call Stanley to pick you up, or have a droid come.” Ford looked the injury over.

“I got it.” The teen grunted. Ford shook his head.

“Perhaps it would do us all good to socialize _within_ the manor property in the future.” He suggested as Rosie trotted up and bumped her head under his hand, panting in her obliviousness of the situation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh AJ, you lovable little scamp! -sitcom theme-


	8. School

News was stirring the refugee kids into a frenzy in their bedroom. Ford had just finished explaining to them that he believed they would be able to start school in the fall. Since they had not had any formal education beyond that before the apocalypse (basically nothing for Willy and AJ), this was extremely exciting news.

“I bet we’ll get to play dodgeball!” Willy announced, excited at the idea. “I always wanted to play that!”

“What’s dodgeball?” AJ asked.

“You throw balls as hard as you can at other people and don’t get hit!”

“That doesn’t sound fun.” AJ observed. The older boy shrugged. Clem scratched Rosie’s head in thought.

“I’d like to be in track, I think. That’s the one where you run and jump hurdles.” She decided.

“Clementine, I don’t think you can run track with one leg.” Violet observed. “You need like, two legs to run, don’t you? Otherwise it’s just hopping…”

“I’ll have a new leg someday. Then I’ll do track.” Clem insisted, smiling at Vi.

“What are we gonna learn at school?” AJ asked. “Besides dodgeball and running and stuff.”

“Well,” Clem thought for a moment, back to her school before the outbreak. “You’ll learn reading, and writing, and math.”

“I already know how to read and write and count.” AJ objected. “You taught me!”

“You’ll learn it better.” Clem responded. AJ considered this for a while.

“Do I have to?” the little boy wondered. “Is it important?”

“Important enough.” Clem was not entirely sure what the importance of reading and writing would be to a pack of kids fresh from an apocalyptic wasteland, but she was glad to be living life like she was normal again.

“I’ll have to go tell Kenny! I bet he’ll be excited!” She got up from the circle and headed off to where she had last seen the man.

* * *

“And, Dr. Pines says we get to each try an after-school activity if we want to!” Clem finished explaining the news to Kenny. He didn’t look thrilled, and she wasn’t sure why.

“Before you get your new leg?” he clarified, apprehensively. Clem agreed that yes, Ford intended to send them to school a few months before she would be able to get a prosthetic leg. Kenny got up without a word and began to limp down the hallway.

“Where are you going?” Clem asked, crutching after him.

“To tell that Pines he’s a fuckin’ idiot. You stay here. You’re not going to school yet.” Kenny responded, turning to stop Clem.

She stopped, but only because she knew the look on his face. Kenny would not be stopped until he confronted the object of his frustration, and unfortunately at the moment, that was Ford. Clem knew she’d go to school. She knew Kenny would come around. He was resistant to change and violent about that resistance, but he would come around. The one-legged girl sat on the couch once inhabited by Kenny and sighed. Rosie came trotting up, her tongue hanging out around a big rubber bone and her nub of a tail wagging. She stood in front of Clem and then very expectantly put the bone down at her owner’s foot, looking back up and wagging the little nub once more.

“Kenny’s being a stubborn jackass again.” Clem informed the dog who nosed her bone a bit closer to the foot in response. “I know he’s worried about me because of my leg, but kids go to school without limbs all the time. He should worry about Vi. She’s mostly blind!” Rosie cocked her head to one side and wagged her tail again. Clem gave her a scratch on the middle of her broad head. “Dr. Pines will explain it to him. He’ll come around.”

Meanwhile, Kenny had made his way to Ford’s office, a space where the researcher worked and sometimes slept if time got away from him. He was there now, writing some more observation on the refugees in a notebook, when Kenny slammed open the door without knocking and marched as menacingly as he could right up to the desk. Ford looked up and quirked an eyebrow at him as the one-eyed man poked a finger roughly into his chest.

“You! You think you know what’s best for everyone, don’t you?”

Ford gently pushed Kenny’s hand out of the way and sighed.

“Can we back up, and perhaps explain where this is coming from?” He asked as levelly as he could. Kenny was a handful, particularly when agitated.

“You want to send those kids to school when they’re not nearly ready.”

“According to my professional opinion,” Ford started, standing, and coming around his desk to face up to Kenny, “they are all adjusted to a suitable level.”

“_’Suitable level!?_’” Kenny cried in outrage, “Clementine has one leg!”

“Plenty of children go to school while missing a limb, Kenny.” Ford assured him.

“No.” Kenny crossed his arms. “She and AJ aren’t going. Do what you will with the others, but they ain’t.”

“They aren’t your children,” Ford reminded him with just a hint of testiness to his voice. “and it isn’t your choice to make.”

“I’ve known them way longer than you have, and I say they’re not ready! What gives you any more authority to tell me and those kids what to do than our own kind and own selves!?” Kenny’s voice was rising in volume as he got angrier, something Ford had witnessed a few times during their meetings together, which he had regularly with all the refugees.

“Kenny,” Ford started, but Kenny interrupted again before he could finish.

“No! No more talking! You stupid fucking nerd types, that’s all you ever do, is talk!”

“Kenny,” Ford tried again and was promptly ignored.

“You think you know more than everyone else in the entire fuckin’ world, don’t you? Just ‘cuz you have some college papers and a fancy fuckin’ office in a fancy fuckin’ mansion, you think you know more than me.” Kenny poked his finger into Ford’s chest again, causing the researcher to put his hands up defensively and lean back a little. “You don’t. You’ve never had a kid, you’ve never seen half the shit I’ve seen, and you don’t know better than I do. Those kids may as well be mine, and I won’t be told what to do with my fuckin’ kids by some crazy, super intelligent_ freak of nature._”

Ford stepped back as if he’d been struck, and then puffed up in his own anger. He could only play the reasonable one for so long, and it was not as though men in his family were renowned for such a thing.

“What makes you think _you _can do it? You have brain damage and only one eye left. If I’m a freak, you’re a punch-happy disfigured idiot! Perhaps it’s for the best your wife and child didn’t make it to year one.” He spat with all the haughtiness and anger within him from Kenny’s insult.

“You fucker…” Kenny growled, launching a full-strength right hook at Ford’s head. Ford, not expecting the resort to violence quite so quickly, was caught off guard and Kenny’s fist connected with his temple just as intended. Instead of Ford going down unconscious, however, there was an audible _clank_ of metal and Kenny immediately began howling in pain and clutching his hand. Ford’s world became unstable and full of ringing deep inside his head as the metal plate installed to keep his old adversaries out of his mind vibrated from the blow.

“SHIT! MY HAND! FUCK!!” Kenny practically wailed as Ford fell to his knees, clutching his head to soothe the ringing.

“Um,” Stan started, standing in the doorway of the office. “everything alright in here?”

* * *

“He keeps giving me dagger eyes whenever he looks up from his hand, so see if you can talk him down and I’ll be in the medical lab when he’s ready to have that hand looked at.” Ford instructed his twin, tenderly probing the bruised right side of his head before replacing an ice pack over the lump.

“Right. What’d you say that made him punch you in the head?” Stan asked, ever curious as to what Ford did to get into trouble. “I mean, not that you don’t look like someone who _should_ get punched, but what’d you do specifically?”

“I lost my temper for a second and insulted him when I shouldn’t have.” Ford admitted. “But… He called me a freak of nature, and you know how I feel about that.” His voice grew bitter as he finished, looking at his unoccupied, six-fingered hand.

“Fucker.” Stan agreed in a growl. “I’ll make sure he knows that’s not okay.”

“Try not to anger him. He’s got a good right hook.” Ford turned to head to the lab, sighing and speaking out loud, “A built in helmet, but at what cost?”

“Aw, is your head pickin’ up that radio station with the bluegrass again?” Fiddleford asked as he overheard, and the two’s conversation faded as he followed his partner to talk.

Stan sighed and turned to Kenny, who had an icepack on his very black and blue and likely broken hand. He sat next to the one-eyed refugee and stared at him until he looked up.

“What’d Ford say?” he asked in the friendliest way he could manage.

“Fucker said it was a good thing my wife and kid died.” Kenny said bitterly, inspecting his hand. “Because I’m an idiot.”

Stan inspected the hand as well and then put the ice back on it. “Okay, but what’d he say that made you call him a freak of nature?”

“He thinks he knows what’s best for Clementine and AJ, and I’ve known them longer, and he doesn’t.” Kenny explained, “They’re not ready for school. Clem has one leg, and AJ still carries a knife around.”

“Do _they_ think they’re ready?” Stan asked, leaning back in his seat a bit.

“They’re kids. They don’t know.” Kenny said firmly.

“Kids know more than you think. About stuff around ‘em, sure, but also about themselves.” Stan shrugged. “You won’t know how right they are until you just let them take the leap.”

“What if they fail?” Kenny shook his head. “What if Clem can’t get around the building and what if- God, what if AJ killed or hurt someone?”

“Hey. What would you trust ‘em with back where you all came from?”

“Well… Clementine can fire a gun, and I was teaching her to drive when we got in the accident that hurt my back…” Kenny admitted. “She can start a fire and skin rabbits and squirrels, she can gut and scale fish too. And bury the guts so a walker doesn’t smell it. Open a can of food with a knife, boil water, mostly to mix formula… She can do a lot of stuff.”

“And the little guy?”

“He…” Kenny thought about it. “Clem says he can fire a gun too, and I guess he’s the one who had the common sense to cut her leg in the first place.”

“So,” Stan started, “these kids can defend themselves from hordes of the undead, do basic survival shit like start fires and cook food over ‘em, and have the common sense to do something to save another person during a huge crisis, and you still think school is gonna be too much?”

Kenny sat silently for a while, considering that. He frowned. “You’re just saying that shit because otherwise you’re speaking against your own brother.”

“I have no obligation to listen to what that egghead says, and in fact as his brother I am more obligated to cause him trouble than to make stuff easier.” Stan responded, subtly sarcastic. “But I mean it. Don’t worry about the kids. Trust that they’ll be alright.”

“What gives you the authority on it? You got kids?” Kenny huffed, but half-heartedly.

“Nah. But I watched the twins over summer for the first time when they were twelve, and it taught me that kids are a lot tougher than you think.” Stan looked at Kenny with a small smirk on his face. “Way tougher.”

Kenny was quiet for a while longer before he lifted the mostly melted ice pack off of his injured hand and inspected the bruising. He shook the hand a little and winced at the ache that spread through it. He looked over at Stan, who had been watching this.

“I should get this looked at. Probably broken.” He said, getting up. Stan watched Kenny leave, wondering if anything he said had any impact on the man at all.

Then, Stan seemed to remember something. He called to Kenny to stop him before he left the room, and strode over to him, gripping his arm with an almost painful amount of strength and pulling him uncomfortably close. Kenny felt suddenly terrified and tried to pull his arm back to no avail as Stan caught him by the front of his shirt and pulled him back into place. Stan’s face was angry and dark now and Kenny did his best to maintain an irritated and not at all scared expression.

“Call my brother a freak of nature again,” Stan snarled, looking Kenny dead in the eye, their noses hardly six inches apart, “and you aren’t just gonna get off with a heart-to-heart, _got it?_”

Kenny tried to regain some face, brushing his shirt off somewhat haughtily with his good hand as Stan released his grip and let him finish leaving the room, but he was cowed. He made a mental plan to apologize to Ford post-haste and thank him kindly for fixing up his hand. And, he thought with an internal sigh, he would have to just let Clementine try to go to school. Stan was right, a teen girl and little boy who could survive the walkers could probably make do in public school.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry folks, I had a block for a while and then when it started to come back (my ability to write that is lol), I got really really sick. I didn't have COVID, I had a medication allergy that we didn't detect for a month. Whoops. Be careful when you start new medicine, folks! Anyway that's why it's been a very long time. I can't say if it will be a long time 'til the next chapter either. I don't have a set schedule, I do this for fun and on my own time and terms lmao.


End file.
